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In the fall of 2015, I happened across the short story “Little Man” by Michael Cunningham in The New Yorker. As a collector of fairy tales, both old and new, I immediately recognized this strange and surprisingly modern twist on “Rumpelstiltskin.” Cunningham revisited this and several other well-known fairy tales in his collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales. With the popular surge in fairy tale retellings, I have often wondered why Cunningham’s take achieved publication in such a prestigious magazine. A close, in-depth reading of his collection revealed elements I seldom see in popular fairy tale renditions. Cunningham utilizes a variety of clever techniques in his stories, but the ones I was most drawn to the most as a writer were his use of sarcastic commentary on modern issues and the juxtaposition of classic fairy tales with contemporary parables.

Of all the stories in the collection, “Jacked”—a contemporary take on “Jack and the Beanstalk”—was the one that captured my interest the most as a deft and detailed commentary on the single parent, only child plight so prevalent among middle-class Americans. Cunningham creates a solid foundation with Jack’s character in the opening lines: “This is not a smart boy we’re talking about. This is not a kid who can be trusted to remember to take his mother to her chemo appointment, or to close the windows when it rains” (23). Forgetting a chemo appointment is a long cry from forgetting to close the windows on a rainy afternoon, yet it perfectly captures the entitled privilege we’ve come to expect from today’s youth.

Cunningham stays faithful to the original plot in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but then modernizes it with a series of witticisms of a sarcastic nature: “The mist-girl tells Jack that everything the giant owns belongs rightfully to him. Jack, however, being Jack, had assumed already that everything the giant owns—everything everybody owns—rightfully belongs to him” (26). Personally, I’ve never been particularly fond of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” And, after reading the story, I was left with the feeling that Cunningham wasn’t in love with the original fairy tale either, which is why he pushes the unlikeable character to even further extremes. A “shockingly expensive haircut” and “200-dollar-jeans” can’t hide Jack’s self-entitled nature as a petty criminal. Cunningham makes the story relevant. He makes it his.

All of the stories in A Wild Swan and Other Tales have roots in classic fairy tales with the exception of “A Monkey’s Paw,” which reimagines the supernatural short story “The Monkey’s Paw” written by W. W. Jacobs in 1902, and the opening and ending stories, which offer broad commentary on people at large. I especially loved Cunningham’s snarky wit in the opening pages of “Dis. Enchant.”: “Vengeful entities seek only to devastate the rarest, the ones who have somehow been granted not only bower and trumpet but comeliness that startles the birds in the trees, coupled with grace, generosity, and charm so effortless as to seem like ordinary human qualities. Who wouldn’t want to fuck these people up?” (3). Cunningham continues his observation of human foibles, allowing the reader the opportunity to connect with an array of fairy tale characters. He offers the opportunity to fantasize and to relate to even the most mundane and petty complaints.

The evil stepmother in “A Wild Swan” is given sympathy after she turns her 12 stepsons into swans and commands them to fly away: “Do we blame her? Do we, really?” (5). The witch from “Hansel and Gretel,” finds her voice in “Crazy Old Lady”: “Were you relieved, maybe just a little, when they lifted you up (you weighed almost nothing by then) and shoved you in to the oven?” (20). In addition to identity, Cunningham plays with sexual themes; Rapunzel keeps her shorn hair so her blinded prince can make love to the piece of her that was lost in “Her Hair,” a boy marries the first girl who doesn’t treat him differently just because he has a prosthetic leg in “Steadfast; Tin,” and a girl agrees to play dead for exactly twelve minutes so her Prince Charming can play out his necrophiliac obsession in “Poisoned.”

Cunningham creates a cast of characters that we know intimately: the people who were only partly cured of their curses gathering in bars, the aging women with no families who become easy targets in their old age, the couple who plays out kinky sex fantasies behind closed doors, the single men who would give anything to have a child without the entanglements of a partner, the couple who finds their love renewed after tasting separation, the girls who wonder if their only choices for a companion are the asshole and the fool, and the men who prefer to forget their losses at the cost of the ones they love. These characters are fragments of ourselves and others, fragments many of us prefer not to face.

As I pondered Cunningham’s treatment of old material in a new light, I realized that I tend to shy away from the very thing he embraces. There are opportunities there, but they can only be broached if I am willing to write from the hard places. Cunningham uses sarcasm to separate himself from his material. He allows the reader to make the obvious connections and then to bear the burden of the revelations mirrored from familiar tales retold in a contemporary setting. I think it’s a fine line to walk, but I also think that this is why Cunningham’s work rises above the multitude of other fairy tale retellings flooding the market. As a writer drawn to similar subject material, I am of the belief that fairy tale retellings work because there is such a breadth of material available to mine. However, I’ve also learned that it isn’t just the more obscure tales that need to be told; it’s the true tales. It’s up to the writers to find new ways to reflect the deepest, darkest parts of themselves through the comforts of the familiar.

Work Cited

Cunningham, Michael. A Wild Swan and Other Tales. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Images: “Little Man” by Zohar Lazar, The New Yorker; “A Wild Swan,” “Poisoned,” and “Beasts” by Yuko Shimizu. All rights retained by the artists.

Although Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are well-known for their work in collecting fairy tales, they were not alone in their interests. Inspired by the Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology), Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, a high-level civil servant, began gathering oral folklore in the mid-1850s from people living in the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria, Germany. However, his compendium of more than 500 tales was locked away and forgotten until the archive was rediscovered and brought to light by Erika Eichenseer in 2012. This new material created a literary sensation that swept across Germany and inflamed the curiosity of fairy tale lovers worldwide, but it wasn’t until The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales was translated by Maria Tatar that the material became available for English speakers to mine. And what promising material it is.

“Schönwerth’s tales have a compositional fierceness and energy rarely seen in stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, collectors who gave us relatively tame versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ ‘Snow White,’ ‘Cinderella,’ and ‘Rapunzel,’” writes Tater (xii-xiii). “Schönwerth gives us a harsher dose of reality. Not one to dress up a tale with literary flourishes or to make it more child friendly, Schönwerth kept the raw energy of the tales, resisting the temptation to motivate surreal plot twists or to smooth out inconsistencies.”

While reading the stories in this collection, I was immediately struck by the inclusion of such familiar symbols as iron shoes, magic rings, and animal helpers. The difficulty came in separating the familiar from the unfamiliar, in search of new ways to approach the literary refinement of oral traditions faithfully transcribed by a civil servant more than 150 years ago. The rambling structures, inconsistent logic, and odd embellishments made me appreciate just how much work the Brothers Grimm had invested in their own canon, which they had extensively revised for popular consumption. These tales have taken on the allure of timelessness, which is one of the reasons fairy tale writers continue to shape them into new forms. Mining original material from Schönwerth’s collection that is suited for modern retellings turned out to be a more difficult task.

When tackling Schönwerth’s material, my first inclination was to favor tales that have similarities to ones that have already been established in the contemporary fairy tale tradition: “The Iron Shoes,” a variation of the lost husband stories such as “East o’ the Sun, West o’ the Moon” and “Thumbnickel,” whose hero brings to mind “Tom Thumb” and “Thumbelina.”

But, in truth, the stories I was most drawn to featured unusual takes on transformation tales. For instance, the Kafkaesque “Prince Dung Beetle” follows a cruel young man who is turned into a beetle for his sins. Another example is the rambling and discordant “The Snake Sister,” where “redemption is born from pain and suffering” (230).

One of the more curious things about the tales published in this book is that they predominantly feature men instead women. Of the 72 stories collected, only about a fourth of them feature female protagonists. Oddly enough, this doesn’t mean that primary (or secondary) female characters are lacking in heroism. For instance, in “The Red Silk Ribbon” the fisherman’s son is the one who must be saved by the princess who married him. The antagonist, a mermaid who seeks to entrap him, transforms her rival into a dragon by throwing blue sand in her face. It takes three attempts at being roasted in kilns before the last of the dragon’s skins are split and discarded, leaving the princess once again in her human form.

Throughout these wonder tales are the “transformations that break down the divide between life and death, nature and culture, animal and human, or beauty and monstrosity” (xvii). Schönwerth’s dedication to the documentation of the oral traditions of his beloved Bavaria is evident in these stories’ raw energy, surreal twists, and unvarnished narratives. “Fairy tales are always more interesting when something is added to them,” Maria Tatar writes. “Each new telling recharges the narrative, making it crackle and hiss with cultural energy” (xvii).

And Schönwerth’s collection offers the prime opportunity to do just that. These tales are vibrant and fragmented and untouched, ready to take on the literary fingerprints of writers seeking fresh material to work with. “Schönwerth’s collection reveals just how comfortably the tales inhabit a world that values spontaneity, improvisation, rough edges, and lack of closure” (xvii). In effect, this discovery and the distribution of these tales is a boon to fairy tale writers looking for fairy tale silver to turn into literary gold.

I suffer from acute procrastination, especially when times are tough. And times have been extremely tough the last few months. Seeing as it’s the first of March and there are no terrible deadlines hovering, I decided it was time to break the silence.

Blog posts are the most enjoyable during the research phases or as a way of reliving a fabulous event. I attended the World Fantasy Convention at the end of October and rode that high for nearly a week before the bottom fell out of my personal life. All of the wonderful words, the excitement, and the momentum gained from this wonderful experience disappeared when I was faced with a dramatic turn of events in my home life.

I don’t want to go into details, but someone close to me made a decision that sent me spiraling and unable to function more than at the basic level. My home, which had been my sanctuary and writing retreat, went up on the market in November and I was faced with the problems of figuring out how to survive on my own while finishing my MFA in creative writing at Stonecoast over the next 18 months. Luckily, I was greeted with love and support by family and friends both home and abroad. I knew the transition was going to still be hard, but it was eased with the knowledge that I would not have to go through these challenges alone.

A few weeks after this rupture in my home life, I went forward with a scheduled knee surgery to address chronic pain and mobility issues caused by my bicycle accident in June. The surgery was supposed to be a breeze, but it turned out to be more complicated than expected. (Go figure.) Boxing up all of my belongings and being faced with the prospect of moving when I couldn’t even walk put me in an even deeper despair that continued through most of December.

On a high note, I took a 10 day trip to Hawaii at the beginning of December. The whole thing had been arranged by my girlfriend’s husband without her knowledge. It was a wonderful surprise and it came at the perfect time. Her love and kindness helped to ease my physical and emotional pain. There is something to be said about stepping away from a negative environment, even if it’s just to take a breath. I wish I could say that my trip to the Paradise of the Pacific healed me–I even considered staying–but I had to return and face the turmoil waiting for me at home.

Things started to look brighter in January. I went to Ireland for 10 days for my second residency at Stonecoast. A few of my classmates and I toured Dublin for three days before taking the train to Howth for a truly remarkable workshop experience. That trip could have (and should have) fueled the fire for half a dozen blog posts. Perhaps, in the coming days, I will return to that time and share some of the details. For now, it’s enough to say that it was a life-changing experience that ended with the thrilling announcement that Elizabeth Hand would be my second semester mentor. I was, and still am, over the moon.

A week after returning from Ireland, the house closed and I had my share of the proceeds in a bank account. Suddenly, I had unbridled freedom and a bit of cash in hand. On a whim, I attended AWP and met up with a few friends. Things started looking up. February was filled with writing my residency response, unpacking and getting (somewhat) settled, attending therapy sessions, preparing and submitting homework packets, and the decidedly uncomfortable process of down-sizing. I also went forward with what I hope will be the last surgery connected to the June ordeal and I am currently in my second week of recovery.

So now, it time to get back to business. As I enter March, I can take a deep breath and count my blessings. Are things perfect? Not yet. But I feel as though I am moving forward more days than not and I am slowly moving into a more positive and productive space. And, I can’t ask for more than that.

Images: Dites le avec des mots (Say it with words); La Dame au dragon (The Lady with the Dragon); Le verre à moitié vide ou à moitié plein !i (The half-empty or half-full glass!); De A à Z, tout sur les oiseaux (From A to Z, all about birds). All rights retained by Catherine Chauloux. To see more of her work, check out the artist’s online gallery.

A couple of years ago, a vibrant rendering of The Magician showed up in my Facebook feed. I was immediately smitten. This was not The Magician I was familiar with, but he hinted at a wild power I was eager to explore. It didn’t take long before I tracked down the source and then became an avid fan of what eventually became The English Magic Tarot.

For more than a decade I had used a Rider-Waite tarot deck, which depicts The Magician as a static character with all of the elements at his disposal. He holds a wand upright and is crowned with the symbol of eternity. Roses and lilies crowd the foreground and a table is laid out with symbols of the minor arcana—swords, staves, coins, and cups. This particular card is one that frequently would show in my readings and it was a familiar sight.

This new depiction of The Magician drawn by artist Rex Van Ryn took my breath away. As the color was added, the card became even more stunning. This magician was not the tamed red-robed mountebank I knew so well. This English magus wields a wild magic. The symbols of the minor arcana are all still present, but they are his feet. This magician can work his spells without the sleight of hand. He transcends the mundane and has opened a portal to a fey world full of tempestuous beauty. This magician needs no wand to work his spells. He is skilled in his craft and he’s not afraid to use his craft.

I connected with Rex through social media and avidly followed his progress as he worked his way through the deck. My Rider-Waite deck was retired after the lifelong friend who’d originally given them to me betrayed our relationship. She had nearly as much energy in that deck as I did and it was time for me to separate myself from the past. Although The English Magic Tarot deck also utilizes the blues, reds, greens, and yellows that are so prominent in the Rider-Waite deck, these images contain darker hues that evoke the English countryside. I loved every single card that he shared and I waited for the deck to become complete. I knew from the beginning that this was a deck I wanted to get my hands on.

In addition to Rex Van Ryn’s work composing these new images,The English Magic Tarot project also drew on the talents of colorist Steve Dooley and author Andy Letcher. It was released by Weiser Books in October 2016. The wait was over.

“This captivating new tarot deck draws us into the vibrant but often hidden world of English magic, evoking a golden age of mysticism, a time when John Dee was Queen Elizabeth’s Court Astrologer, antiquarian John Aubrey rediscovered ancient sacred sites, and the great physicist Isaac Newton studied alchemy.”

When my new deck arrived, I spent some time getting acquainted with the cards and then decided to get down to business. The traditional spreads I had used in the past didn’t feel quite right, so I followed a layout described in The English Magic Tarot book—The Prism Spread, “named after Isaac Newton, and his discovery that light could be split into its constituent parts with a prism of glass.” The results were enlightening indeed.

The cards revealed that I was in the middle of a full-blown identity crisis (Page of Coins, reversed) and that I felt isolated and trapped in a place of pain and sorrow (Queen of Swords). My creativity had been stifled (Three of Wands, reversed) and I was hoping for a return to good times and abundance, even if it was just for a short time (Nine of Coins, reversed). In the greater context, the cards showed that I was a sensual and creative person, but that my powers had been blocked (the Empress, reversed). I needed to put my emotions aside in order to make room for new ideas and intellectual insight (Ace of Swords). People around me realized my difficulty in controlling my intense emotional strife (Knight of Cups). The challenge was in accepting the fact that things were not going the way I had hoped, but that I still had the potential to eventually succeed (Six of Wands, reversed). However, with perseverance, I will eventually reach my goals and the rewards of material wealth (Seven of Coins).

Those of you who know me will see the uncanny truth unveiled in this reading. I have, indeed, been questioning my creative calling and have been dwelling on my lack of self-worth. My bicycle accident in June left me broken in body and spirit, which has put me in a place where I feel terribly isolated and desperate for the return of health and happiness. The concussion I received from the head trauma has created problems with cognition and has effectively blocked my creativity. This has left me struggling with volatile emotional swings and the depths of despair. I know that I need to accept the limitations placed on my mobility and intellect. Eventually, I will heal. I just have to be patient. It’s incredibly difficult, but I am slowly making gains and each day I’m able to accomplish a little bit more.

My reading with The English Magic Tarot has reminded me that there is always a silver lining. You just need to know where to look. Magical, indeed.

Note: Rex Van Ryn gave me permission to include images of the deck and my reading for the purposes of this blog. All Rights Reserved by the artists.

I began reading Helen Macdonald’s heartfelt memoir, H Is for Hawkin early June. Based on the author’s family history and intertwined with reflections on T.H. White and the history of falconry, Macdonald’s book won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year Award in 2014. Her compelling take on “the archaeology of grief” and her decision to train a goshawk as a form of solace and redemption transform the concept of a memoir into something more than words on a page. It unfolds as a study on ways to move through the landscape of time and space.

“We are very bad at scale,” writes Macdonald. “The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”

“It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion;” she continues, “that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them – that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky, this might somehow be revealed to me.”

In the past, I’ve written numerous articles blending fact and fiction in essays linking nature and myth. Macdonald takes this one step further with first-person accounts reflecting on concepts of loss and the experience of communing with nature as she trains a goshawk she names Mabel. As part of the process, Macdonald folds the narrative into shared experiences with T.H. White: “The lines between the man and landscape blur,” writes Macdonald. “When White writes of his love for the countryside, at heart he is writing about a hope that he might be able to love himself.”

“Like White I wanted to cut loose from the world,” she continues, “and I shared, too, his desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair.”

This was something I could relate to. But her grief at the loss of her father was foreign to me. It wasn’t until I was in a traumatic bicycle accident a few days later that I began to connect with the rawness of her sorrow.

“Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft,” Macdonald writes. “It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.’ Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”

I did not lose a member of my family or one of my friends. I lost myself. And I had no way to grapple with the devastation wreaked upon my body and soul until I once again picked up H Is for Hawk. This time, the text took on a new meaning.

My accident occurred when I was about halfway through the book, just as I had started Chapter 13, “Alice, Falling.” It seemed appropriate. “And me? I do not know,” Macdonald writes. “I feel hollow and unhoused, an airy, empty wasps’ nest, a thing made of chewed paper after the frosts have murdered the life within.” The author’s grief mirrored my own.

“The archaeology of grief is not ordered,” reflects Macdonald. “It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.”

And this proved true. Like Macdonald, I worked through the loss of who I had been. It was a slow process, one that still presents challenges as I continue the transformation. There are times when I want to run away, times I am overwhelmed with the desire to escape the realities presented by loss, but these impulses are coming further and further apart. And one day, I hope to find resolution in the way I see myself and the world I live in.

“There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all,” Macdonald writes. “You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.”

And that’s what it’s all about, growth through loss—“a reckoning…of all the lives we have lost (Macdonald)”—and the lives we have yet to discover.

Artwork: Green Voices, Night Hawk, and Horus-Spirit of the Hawk by Susan Seddon-Boulet. All Rights Reserved by the artist.

It’s been a while since I’ve been here–nearly two months. A lot has happened since I last posted. I hope that as my health returns, I will be able to blog more consistently. I would like to post weekly, but we will have to wait and see what happens.

I am currently getting geared up for my first residency at Stonecoast. I will be in Maine from July 8-18 and will be working with David Anthony Durham as well as Theodora Gossand Elizabeth Hand during workshops and I have a whole line-up of seminars and graduate presentations I plan on attending. it should be an incredible experience and I can’t wait to be there. In addition to having been one of five candidates chosen to enter the Popular Fiction track this semester, I have also been awarded a graduate scholarship from The University of Maine for this semester’s 6 credits. It was a wonderful surprise and I feel blessed to have been chosen for this honor. It’s not something I take lightly. The last bit of news on my MFA program is that I was also chosen to be one of ten students awarded the opportunity to attend Stonecoast in Ireland for my January residency. It’s all very exciting.

Now a bit about the bad:

On June 11, I had a terrible bicycle accident. I was going downhill on a road, looked over my left shoulder to ask my companion which way to turn. I have only been riding for a little over a year, so I still have a tendency to turn my handlebars in the direction I am looking. I don’t remember anything after looking over my shoulder, but apparently I had a run in with a big patch of gravel in the street. It stopped my bike abruptly and I was thrown face down into the street and all of the loose gravel that had collected at the bottom of the hill tore me to pieces.

Luckily, my sister Nikki Couch was in her truck following us and was able to stabilize me until the ambulance arrived. I was unconscious for most of this time, although I do remember being loaded into the ambulance and seeing her arms gloved in blood. The next 12 hours were a blur. I was in and out of consciousness. I remember my sister’s voice, my boyfriend holding my hand, the techs cutting off the shredded remains of my clothes, the anesthesia. In the end, I was in surgery for four hours.

There was extensive road rash on the tops of my hands and feet and knees. My left knee was cut to bone and required 12 staples. My chest was abraded to the point where there was no skin left, which required it being treated as a severe burn case, as they have been trying to regrow skin from the bottom up. The worst damage was my face. My helmet saved my life and my glasses saved my eyes, but there was extensive damage to my mouth and right cheek. I had stitches inside my lower lip and from my upper lip to my nose. I also had stitches on a long cut across the cheekbone near my lower eyelid. Unfortunately the stitches under my eye did not hold as the skin died and I will be having reconstructive surgery on July 19, the day after I return from my residency.

I have been posting photos of my recovery on Facebook, but I’ve been asked to put them altogether in a sort of album. So here they are, so far. I’m not done healing yet. I have work to do!

A photo of me before the accident.The accident happened around 4:30 pm on June 11. This is a photo of me after 12 hours being treated in the trauma unit.This is in the evening of June 12 after my sister cleaned me up and washed most of the blood out of my hair.A wonderful tech named Danisha washed and braided my hair and made me feel human again. This is from June 13.June 14. Things are looking up, but I’m having difficulty transitioning to oral pain medications.June 15. Notice the blue gown. My bed is no longer booby trapped. Time to go home even though they wanted to keep me another day.June 16. Finally home and being treated like a queen by my guy and his son. I want for nothing.June 17. Venturing outside.

June 18. Full body shot. Still pretty banged up.June 19. Does the wavy hair detract from my poor beat up face?June 21. Stitches came out yesterday. I thought everything would keep getting better. At the time, I did not know that the skin under my eye had died and that the stitches didn’t take.June 23. I am about to discover that the surgery under my eye failed and that I have a long journey of facial reconstruction ahead of me.The wound under my eye has completely separated and my lower lid has begun to droop. Big problems. But the makeup and eye patch helped a little. June 24.July 27. The verdict is in. I need a skin graft on the skin under my lower right eyelid. The surgeon will be taking the skin from the upper lid, but he won’t do the the lid lift on the left eye in case the graft doesn’t take and he needs another source of skin. I am scheduled for surgery July 19, the day I return from Stonecoast. Once it has healed, I will be able to get the other eyelid done so my eyes will look symmetrical. The second surgery will be done in 3-6 months and the cost will have to come out of pocket. I am looking at needing some serious change to look somewhat normal. Scary stuff.

Although I could have had my surgery done on July 12, I refused the chance to miss my first residency, so I delayed the surgery until July 19. It has been an emotional time, but now I need to write. I need deadlines. I need reinforcement. And I need support.

I have a Patreon account that is set up for people who want to support my work. You can help with as little as $1 a month. There are levels with goodies such as poems and stories and other fun rewards. My gig with Bootprints went belly-up, so I am back where I started. Any little bit will help.

March was full of fabulous news, which I’d hoped to share. Unfortunately, I’ve been shut down as I transferred my content to a new server. As I am far from being a pro in matters of technology, I stumbled through the process over the course of several weeks. In the end, I axed all of my blogs prior to January this year, but I’ve finally got everything else back up and running.

This Spring, I was notified that I made the cut for the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing. I’m thrilled with the opportunity and have been gearing up for what promises to be a challenging and productive two years studying and writing in the field of Popular Fiction. My first residency will be held in Portland, Maine this July with workshops by David Anthony Durham, Theodora Goss, and Elizabeth Hand. I can’t wait!

In other news, I’ve picked up a freelance gig writing about travel along the Front Range for Bootprints. In the past two months, I’ve written about dinosaur hikes, the quirky town of Carbondale, snowkiting in Dillon, biking Denver’s urban trails, glamping, breweries by bike in Boulder, spring wildflower hikes, and a few other fun escapes in this state I love so. If you have any suggestions for story ideas, please send them my way.

As to my writing schedule, I’m getting into a good routine and I’m planning to get back into a more regular pattern publishing posts. My blogs will be coming out once a week and will include a wide variety of material including book and film reviews, musings on my current works-in-progress, fairy tales and folklore, commentary on the mythic arts, travel and leisure, and new projects. It’s going to be a busy summer.

See you in May!

Images: I am half-sick of shadows, 1916 and The Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot, 1894 by John William Waterhouse.